Celebrity spotting!!!

Living in the Dublin city centre you'd think I see celebrities all the time. The truth is I probably do, but they're most likely Irish celebrities so I have no idea who they are.

However, today I saw my first real celebrity! I was walking down Leeson Street and who should walk past, but Bubbles (aka Andre Royo) from The Wire! How appropriate that my first celebrity should be from a show about Baltimore! Woot! The Irish Independent reported yesterday that Dominic West, who played Jimmy McNulty, was married in Limerick over the weekend and some cast members of The Wire were over for it.

And no, I didn't say anything to him. But, I decided if I happened across him again (Dublin is small like that), I would definitely say something. I spent the rest of my walk trying to come up with something, but no luck. Fortunately I didn't see him again so I didn't need to make an ass out of myself!

You Capture: Get Down Low

Weekend in Cork

Last weekend we went to visit the in laws down in Cork. We had a few hours in Cork City before getting the bus to Crosshaven. We stumbled across this totally cool car:

Upon further inspection we discovered it is a Messerschmitt. This meant nothing to me, but it got the husband pretty excited. Apparently Messerschmitt was a German aircraft manufacturing company. According to Wikipedia, they weren't allowed to manufacture planes after WWII, so they made cars. Pretty cool!

We finally made our way to Crosshaven which looked like this all weekend:

Gorgeous.

Then we sent my niece out to wash the car. She needs to earn her keep!

Hope you had a great weekend!

You Capture - Water

Living in Ireland, I thought this would be an easy one, but we've been blessed with some sunny dry days this week! Here are my shots. Little Kitty was a very good model. It's really hard to take a picture of your pet's tongue! Plus, I kept experimenting with different settings to get it right. I changed them around so much, I don't even remember which ones finally worked.

Clouds (aka water droplets!)

Reflections in a pond

Drinks! And....

...dribbles!!!

New food blog post

Just added a simple summer salad!

When being an expat well and truly sucks.

My grandma died yesterday and I can't go to the funeral. This sucks. My grandfather died last year and I couldn't go to that one either. That sucked. Unfortunately, last minute international flights (particularly in the summer time) aren't cheap.

Enough whining about that, let me tell you about my grandma.

Here she is with her boys!

She was a lovely Grandma who knitted lots of things for all her granddaughters (not sure if my cousin, Craig, ever got anything knitted), bought us our yearly pair of clogs, got all us girls matching shiny roller skate jackets (yes!), took us camping, made us yummy food, and thought her sons (my dad and uncles) walked on water. 

I think my favorite story about Grandma happened when my dad was a teenager. Dad was at the town fair was hit by a race car which had gone off the track and broke his leg. Since he couldn't ride his bike, she took over his paper route and got her picture in the local paper delivering the papers! Sassy!

One of the most random memories is of a trip we took to a farm shop in Everett. I'm fairly certain it was just me and her. Why my sister wasn't there? No idea. Or maybe she was and I don't remember. Sorry Julie! We went to this farm shop and we bought Colby Jack cheese, which I had never tried before and have loved ever since. I don't think it's any sort of coincidence that a good memory for me involves cheese. We came back to the house and I had a ham and cheese sandwich, sitting at the table on a barrel stool, with a jewel-colored cushion, on the screened-in, astro-turfed carport. Perfection.

I am a lucky girl to have had such awesome grandparents and great-grandparents! Seriously, I just have an awesome family full stop. One day I asked Wes what he was thinking about and he said, 'How nice your family is.' 

Nice doesn't even begin to describe them.  They were willing to burn their retinas for these pictures!

The Sproats

 The Furrys

Fresh salsa for everyone!

Look at what happened in my garden since last night!

In case you wanted to see a close up!

I don't know the last time I was so excited! I can taste the fresh salsa already!

You Capture - Fun

Nothing says 'fun' like going to free burrito day at Boojum with a friend! They had a band, people in sombreros, and free chips and salsa while you waited by the door. Awesome.

Make your garden grow

Liz scored some free tickets to the Bloom garden festival held in Phoenix Park and was nice enough to invite her fellow unemployed friend to check it out. I'll let you in on a little secret - neither Liz or I have a garden. We don't even have balconies to have potted gardens. That didn't stop us from taking advantage of some complimentary tickets on a sunny day (see yesterday's post on the weather report). Even though we felt a bit like posers (especially in the garden furniture section) we managed to enjoy ourselves. No surprise that our favorite part was the food tent which was loaded with free samples. We tried sausage, fresh squeezed orange juice, chocolate, smoked salmon, strawberries (the best I've had outside of PA!), oh, and cheese. Lots of cheese. We each brought home some of this:

It's a garlicky delicious COWS cheese. The crossed out goat cracked me up, especially since I think goat's cheese is vile.

The festival is held in the visitor's centre of Phoenix Park where there is a walled garden. These beautiful flowers may have inspired me:

You see, I went ahead and planted our garden today.

The woman at Meadow & Byrne told me these actually work, so we shall see! For two euros it's worth a shot. They even had kits for tomato, pepper, and french bean plants. I'm a bit skeptical on those, but if this works I may branch out and try something a bit more adventurous!

Maybe my new blog theme will be gardening!

Delicate Flower

Today I thought I was going to melt from the heat and it was 68 degrees F, maybe 70 in the direct sun. I have a hard time believing that I could once handle temperatures in the 90s.

In other news....dear people of Dublin, I am not a tourist. I live here.

I should have just gone back to bed!

This whole morning was a comedy of errors. I got my 4:45am wake up call to take my temperature and do one of those ovulation predictor kit thingies. Of course the smiley face appears on the day that Wes is going to Berlin for a few days. Great. Clearly I'm not worried about jinxing things (yes, I'm 35 years old) by mentioning it on here. At about 6am the cat decides to puke. She was nice enough to jump off the bed before doing this, so that's one good thing! Alarm goes off again at 7am so husband can get up to catch said flight to Berlin. In the process of me moving the pillows around I knock over the lamp. Oops. Then a glass tips over and shatters into about 100 pieces. Now I'm annoyed. So I have to get up at 7am to clean up wet, broken glass. As I was pushing the vacuum back to the bedroom, I stepped on the cord causing the vacuum to stop short and the handle jam into my abdomen. Hard. Pretty sure this has null and voided any progress the smiley face would have made! While I'm cleaning up the glass I step to the side in such a manner that I turn my ankle a bit. Then, as the husband is heading out the door he informs me the internet isn't working. What!? WHAT!??? I clearly have an addiction problem to the information super highway. I lasted 2.5 hours until I had to make contact with the outside world. Liz checked her working internet and got me my dealer's internet company's helpline. There was some national problem which had been fixed and you just needed to unplug and plug back in the modem. OHTHANKGOD!!!

By 11:30am the stars had realigned and all was well with the world again. I hope I can sleep soundly tonight (well, at least until 4:45am when it all starts again).

You Capture - One Shot

The photo challenge for this week was to take a bunch of pictures and pick your favorite shot. If you're going to get stuck on the DART, the track between Dalkey and Shankill is a pretty good spot for it to happen!

A few shots from the weekend

We had a fun weekend and I thought I'd share a few photos. On Saturday we went to the Point Village Market in the Dublin Docklands. This was the first weekend of it and I hope it catches on. Dublin needs to have a market like this. It's comforting to know where to go to buy cookies the size of my face.

Yes, I'm wearing my winter coat and I wasn't too happy about it. Fortunately it did warm up a bit and I could actually unbutton it. Boo!

Oh, and I couldn't resist a picture of this guy in his underpants. I thought he was hilarious!

On Sunday we went for a long walk to Chapelizod (it was about 3 miles away), had a nice pub lunch, then walked back through the Phoenix Park. It was 6.75 miles in all! The weather was gorgeous, no winter coats needed here, and we had our first 99s of the season (although they were cut out of the picture!).

On our walk with Chapelizod Church in the distance.

You can see the top of my cone, but that's it. Oops!

Hope you had a great weekend too!